Hello friends,

Registration is open for the final workshop in the current Five Animal Frolics series: Monkey, on July 29th.

Monkey is the animal associated with summer, fire, and joy, and it’s often the one I choose to finish with when I practice the whole Five Animals set. There’s an element of just letting go of our cares in it which can be a very satisfying place to end. I hope you’ll find it so, too.

It’s also one with multiple overlapping stories about it, as befits the essence of monkey: unpredictable, hard to pin down, creative and destructive at the same time. It’s not so far from the character of Raven in local First Nations stories.

One story is explicit in the name of the yang movement: “Monkey picks the Peach of Immortality”. Peaches of Immortality are a recurring theme in classical Chinese stories and poetry, and one of the consistent themes is that they are forbidden to mortals. So naturally this qigong set features the monkey overstepping its bounds and grabbing one, over and over again.

A second story is that whoever codified this qigong set did not like monkeys. The yin movement involves breathing in an odd way and pulling an ugly face, alternately to left and right. And the yang movement ends with the monkey looking at this peach it stole and deciding to just throw it away.

I got a bit too fixated on this negative framing for a while, but it never quite fit right. Why would someone who hated monkeys match them with the emotion of joy? Then in a class I was taking a couple of years ago, a fellow student offered a constructive reframing: nothing is wasted in nature, and every peach that the monkey throws away is available to the animals that can’t climb. Monkey sneaks access to this thing it’s not supposed to be allowed, then decides it’s not worth keeping to itself, so it lets everyone else get a bite too.

That loops back to the release which makes this such a good place to end the set. We act out striving and striving to reach the forbidden fruit, struggling to bring it home, and then literally letting it go. I know I’m not the only one who regularly needs the reminder that letting go is an option.

I hope you can join me to play through all this.

Details:

• Wednesday July 29th, 5:30-7pm.

• Outdoors in míqәn / Beacon Hill Park. I’ll send everyone who registers directions to the exact location the day before.

• Rain site at theDock, 722 Cormorant Street in case we need it.

• $16.50 / person including fees.

• Beginners always welcome, no prior experience assumed.

• Registration online at https://eldan-goldenberg.bloomtickets.ca/event/1132

And after this, who knows? I plan to keep teaching this set, but need to figure out a different format. One of my current exercises in letting go is not knowing what that’s going to look like. If you have ideas about scheduling, venues, and so on, drop me a line - this could be your chance to get some things scheduled when suits you.